


Old Shadows

by Sildae



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, post-Zygerria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 05:04:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3557072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sildae/pseuds/Sildae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ahsoka asks Anakin about his past after the events on Kadavo and Zygerria.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Windona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windona/gifts).



> 1) TCW - Ahsoka asks Anakin about his past after the events on Kadavo and Zygerria.

They had a ritual of sorts.

It wasn't anything the Council would probably approve of—or even Master Kenobi, come to think of it. But ever since he'd taken her on, she'd found her way to his quarters after particularly bad missions.

Blow off steam just by being people. No meditation; just easy companionship.

She'd sit, knees tucked to her chest and arms around her legs. He'd work—always—on droids. Tiny, delicate soldering; fine-tuned wires; maybe a web of thin cables for another macro-wipe of glitchy mouse droids.

Ahsoka wondered if the other Masters had learned to hide their personal droids from Anakin—or at least, if they didn't want certain modifications to show up on said droids.

They'd talk, usually. Or she'd talk and he'd listen. For everything that she'd heard about Anakin Skywalker before she'd become his Padawan, he was a surprisingly good listener.

Sometimes, he'd share stories of his own Padawan-ship; or even better, his misadventures of those first years, when he'd been brought to the Temple and his efforts to prove himself had—at least on one occasion—destroyed a lower hangar.

Ahsoka swore that one still smelled like smoke, eight years later.

She'd heard versions of those stories, of course. Or rather, the legends. But to hear it from the eopie's mouth...

Well. She couldn't look at the old pod-racing poster over his bed without stifling a giggle.

A full year of being Anakin Skywalker's Padawan, and their tradition continued. And sometimes what he'd talk about were things she knew the Council wouldn't approve of—about the war, about the Senate, about the Jedi, even about the clones. A lot of it, she agreed with.

Some of it unnerved her.

It wasn't until Master Kenobi let slip one simple detail of Anakin's life that so much of what he said slid into frightening clarity.

Two days after docking back on Coruscant, her throat still ached from the Zygerrian shock collar and she barely knocked before slipping into her Master's room. For once, his soldering pin was resting, dark and untouched, on its cradle and not one cranium or memory bank was cracked open.

Instead—and somehow, to her lack of surprise—he stood with his arms folded across his chest and eyes fixed out the window, bars of late afternoon light striped across his robes and throwing his scowl in sharp relief.

She'd felt his mood from two corridors away.

Her Master hated pity. At least when it was directed at him.

So she sat like she used to. Close to the window—and conveniently near him, now—her knees folded up toward her body and arms draped over them. The Temple stone was cold against her bare back, but she didn't remember that chill, last year.

Anakin was silent.

She started talking.

"You know, you told me about that podrace—the one down in the K'recki Waterworks, back when you were—I think eleven?" Ahsoka hesitated; it was hard to imagine what her Master looked like as a youngling; she'd caught glimpses of him back then, but it was always from a distance. The Council's reasoning behind his entry into the Order was probably a tightly held secret, which was likely why everyone knew of it within a matter of hours—and some of the older younglings had whispered on and on about a prophecy. Ahsoka had ignored it for fencing strategies, because that was much more interesting than some weird nugget of history. "And you said Master Kenobi nearly lost his head to a Gamorrean and you nearly lost your head to Master Kenobi." She paused—just a second, just to gauge his expression, before continuing. "But you never told me that you actually started a riot."

Still nothing; not even a twitch of the muscles along his jaw. The light had shifted over his eyes and the intensity of the blue reminded her of Zygerria's sun-seared sky. And the heat. And the crackle of electricity, wrapping around her throat to seize her lungs.

"A riot that lasted three days," she went on. "Completely tore apart Ziro the Hutt's palace down there and it took a task force of three hundred to break it all up." It has impossible not to see the humor in it. "Not bad for an eleven year old."

"People died in that riot."

People die every day, and we can only do so much.

Ahsoka tucked her chin against her arm and held those particular words back. "Yeah. But they were fighting to be free."

There was that muscle along his jaw, flexing to the point she felt the vibration of grinding teeth against her montrals.

"Doesn't take away the fact that I started it."

"All those people are free today because of what you started down there. It doesn't matter that you didn't mean to start a rebellion—just by being there, you did it." Her Master didn't respond, but that muscle had stilled. "All my people are free again because of what you did," she added, careful to keep her voice soft.

"It takes more than one person to bring down an empire, Ahsoka. The Zygerrians had been working to rebuild for some time. You saw the final reports." Kadavo had been brutal to the Togrutans; at least ten-thousand dead, a number Roshti had painstakingly figured as the Wolfpack attempted to sort the survivors into family units.

She heard the creak and strain of leather, both of his hands fisted in frustration, a tension that coiled through their bond and settled heavily in her montrals. He'd blamed himself.

"And if they're not," he went on, "some other group will. It's the way slavers work. They're a pestilence. A disease."

He spat the word, but otherwise, didn't move, still a tightly held nexu, judging its tethers. But he wasn't a slave; not anymore.

"We'll keep fighting, Master. You know that."

The silence that held between them surprised her. She knew her Master; the promise of a fight pulled him forward as inexorably as a whispermoth to a glowrod.

When he did speak, he surprised her further.

"Obi-Wan told you."

It wasn't hard to guess what. "Yes."

"He shouldn't have."

She spoke before she could stop herself. "Maybe you should have."

He was silent another long, few minutes.

"There are still millions of slaves out there," he finally said, as if Ahsoka hadn't spoken. "My mother was one—she got free without my help. But that didn't keep her alive. Once you've been a slave, you're never really free, Ahsoka."

There was a dangerous, bloody edge to his voice and again—just for a moment—Ahsoka could only think of those fingers of electricity, coating the insides of her lungs and drowning out the Force and the universe in bright, hellish pain.

There was always a dark hollow in Anakin. She'd felt it more and more as the Master-Padawan bond had grown stronger. Before, she'd thought it was the war, taking a brutal toll on him; now, she wondered if it had always been there, like some sort of long-festering wound.

"Maybe." She chose her next words carefully. "But what about this. What really is freedom to a Jedi?"

That drew him out. He glanced down at her, one eyebrow cocked up, but Ahsoka didn't back down. She lifted her own white markings in challenge. He was the Master, after all.

"Do we need to break out the Code, my young Padawan?"

Ahsoka fought back a smirk. "Maybe, Master. So, to you, what is freedom?"

Anakin snorted softly and turned back to the skyline beyond his window. "Choice. Choice to have victory or retreat. A choice to stay or walk away."

"Doesn't sound very...Jedi."

Anakin breathed in sharply. "It's not. It's what I thought freedom was as a—as a kid. As a Jedi—we're free only to keep others free."

"And that's not worth it?"

Her Master hesitated, eyes still fixed on the skylanes beyond the Temple.

Ahsoka pressed that small victory. "For every single person that's living without a slave collar, what we did mattered. So even if the reports make it all seem hopeless, I know we did the right thing. They needed us." She hesitated, then added, softly, "They'll always need us. That's why we're Jedi."

It took another long, excruciating few minutes, but finally a familiar half-grin cracked his face. "When did you get so smart?"

She answered with her own half-grin. "Learned it all from the best, Master."


End file.
